


be your perfect disaster (five times)

by limned



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 5 Times, Accidental Voyeurism, Established Relationship, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, POV Outsider, Partnership, Post-Mission, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-04
Updated: 2017-05-04
Packaged: 2018-10-27 20:51:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10816506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limned/pseuds/limned
Summary: S.H.I.E.L.D. is one screwed-up organization.





	be your perfect disaster (five times)

1\. 

This isn’t his first rodeo. When he sees Romanoff’s thousand-yard stare and how close Barton is sticking to her, Otieno doesn’t even think about approaching.

Barton shoots him a warning look as they come up the Herc’s cargo ramp and he nods in acknowledgement, retreating to the forward sidewall by the crew chief. He doesn’t like it because Romanoff is banged up worse than he’s ever seen her before, limping, bruises covering her face, one eye swelled partially closed; her wrists are scraped raw and something is wrong with her left shoulder. But she’s ambulatory and not visibly bleeding out so he’s already resigned himself to being underemployed on the way back to Ramstein. Barton isn’t going to let anyone near her unless she starts to lose consciousness. The flight crew know the score and maintain careful distance as they complete their preflight.

Unfortunately he forgets about Shipley, who has already darted halfway down the aircraft with that irritating FNG quickness before Otieno sees him moving.

Barton’s head whips around and he shouts, _"Don’t touch her!"_ so loud that it cuts through the noise of the engines spinning up, and the kid jumps back, shocked, which is a very good thing because Romanoff’s knife slashes through the air where his throat had been a fraction of a second earlier.

It’s over before Otieno has time to reach them. Barton wrestles her backward and pins her in the seat, talking urgently into her ear, and Romanoff doesn’t drop the knife but she doesn’t fight him.

He hauls Shipley away by the collar of his tac vest and shoves him into the seat by the crew chief. The kid’s eyes are so wide that Otieno has to fight the insane urge to laugh, because it really isn’t funny. At a minimum Barton’s reaction time just saved him from some very serious in-flight employment. He leans down to say through the engine roar, “Don’t move an inch until we land, got it? Then we have a talk about patient evaluation,” and the kid nods frantically, one hand moving to grope at his neck.

He doesn’t watch them directly because Romanoff might take it as a threat, but he keeps them in his peripheral vision in case her condition deteriorates and Barton signals for help.

Halfway through the flight Barton comes up to borrow his med kit and Otieno hands it over with no questions. She must be starting to level out if he feels safe enough to step away for a minute. 

He keeps watch in short glances for the last two hours. He sees how carefully Barton cleans and bandages the ugly abrasions around her wrists, sees the way Romanoff gradually stops staring at nothing and focuses on him instead, and sees when she rests her head against his shoulder and finally looks like something that isn’t a weapon.

 

2.

“Oh, jesus,” Hill barks, when yet another person walks into her office without knocking. “What. _What?"_

It doesn’t work. Sheehan is even more pissed than the last three handlers because it was his agent who got the broken nose, and he isn’t letting her intimidate him out of filing an official complaint. When he finishes venting and storms away, Hill does thirty seconds of deep, calm breathing instead of hurling her tablet into the wall. Then she decides to have a cheesesteak in the mess before anyone else shows up to rant at her.

It’s like a miracle when Romanoff appears at the elevators. That mission wasn’t projected to finish until Saturday at the earliest. “Thank god,” Hill says involuntarily. “Did you just land?”

“Yeah, an hour ago. Auckland was easier than we thought.” Romanoff glances over with one eyebrow raised, then sighs. “What’s he done?”

“Took over the basic and intermediate hand-to-hand classes and beat the crap out of them, four days running. This morning he broke Agent Wilder’s nose with his cast.”

“Wilder’s an asshole,” Romanoff says dismissively. “I hope he didn’t damage the cast.”

Hill lets herself grin a little since there’s no one else in the hallway to see it. “Okay if your next mission is saving me from doing disciplinary paperwork? He won’t have field clearance for another month.”

Romanoff’s mouth twitches. “No problem. He’ll behave himself. That or I’ll break the other arm.”

Barton is sitting alone at a table in the middle of the mess and glowering at his turkey sandwich rather than eating it. The noise level dips slightly but perceptibly when Romanoff strides across the room and sits down next to him. His eyes had tracked her approach but by the time she settles into the chair, he’s glaring at the sandwich again. The elbow of his cast is still showing traces of Wilder’s blood.

S.H.I.E.L.D. is one screwed-up organization. Hill reminds herself of this, not for the first time, as she gets her cheesesteak from the hot line and then spends the next twenty minutes watching a roomful of agents pretend that they’re not watching one person stare at another. Romanoff looks perfectly calm and not at all bothered by either the audience or the length of time it takes for Barton’s expression to go from serial-killer furious to just cranky.

Once it happens, Romanoff leaves to get her own sandwich and takes the seat across from him when she comes back. Barton still doesn’t look happy, but he does start eating his lunch.

 

3.

Reyes is working through the crowd to get his sister-in-law another vodka cranberry –- _fuck_ does he hate this club, and Nassau County, and also his brother for living here –- when he spots something familiar across the room.

For the first two seconds he’s sure it’s a hallucination, because there’s no way that Natasha Romanoff is doing shots in a horrible nightclub in East fucking Meadow. Not happening. He’s just had too much whiskey and maybe a minor stroke.

The next second he gets another glimpse through the shifting bodies and it’s her, no doubt, and his brain immediately switches into operational mode -- or tries to, because it really has been a lot of whiskey -– and he thinks, _Christ, she’s working. No clue about the mission, gotta be something big, Widow doesn’t work in the States unless it’s big. Gotta act normal or somebody could pick me out as S.H.I.E.L.D._

Then his operational brain screeches to a halt when he sees the man sitting next to her on the bench, tossing back his own shot with his other arm hooked around Romanoff’s waist.

Reyes knows for a solid goddamn fact that Clint Barton is not doing a mission today, not in New York or anywhere else, because he climbed off a C-17 with the guy eight hours ago after watching him kill fourteen A.I.M. targets in the Colombian jungle yesterday.

The crowd parts again, long enough for a terrifyingly clear view of Romanoff climbing into Barton’s lap, straddling him, and kissing him so deep and filthy that they’d get arrested if they were doing it anywhere else.

Holy _shit_.

He needs to clear the hell out of this club five minutes ago; he’s going to be dead if they know he saw Barton’s hands on her ass like that. They're probably in East Meadow because they thought it was the last place they’d ever run into anyone familiar, and man, he is not going to correct them on that idea.

His brother and sister-in-law take the wrong meaning from, _“Gotta leave right now, there’s people from work who shouldn’t see me,”_ and assume that he spotted a terrorist or a mobster or something, but they’re up and out the door so fast that Reyes is kicking himself for not thinking of this tactic earlier.

 

4.

Greider knows she isn’t supposed to look at the feeds for range number three. Secured means exactly that, off-limits, the recorded logs viewed by the higher-ups only if something goes wrong enough to warrant it. The ranges are not secured or cleared of non-essential personnel unless absolutely necessary.

But it’s Barton who requested the status, and he’s never done that before. He added an extra parameter to clear the quartermaster from the range and that’s just weird. Greider hasn’t seen that, didn’t even know it was allowed.

The curiosity digs at her until she opens the feeds on her monitor after ten minutes.

It looks normal at first. Barton is standing in the middle lane with his bow, drawing and firing on a steady count way slower than he’s capable of, maybe three seconds per shot. She can see from the overhead feed that he’s using twelve targets in sequence to plant spiraling arrow patterns from the bulleye to the outer rings. The sound quality in her headphones is so amazingly good that she can hear the reverberation of his bowstring.

It abruptly doesn’t look normal when Romanoff steps up close behind him.

“No cheating,” he says sternly. “Push me and you lose.”

“Oh, I won’t _push_ you,” she says, low and amused, and Greider feels her mouth drop open when Romanoff slides a careful hand around Barton’s waist and unbuckles his belt.

She’s standing off-center behind his right shoulder, clear of his quiver as he keeps reaching for arrows and firing, and she very clearly has her hand wrapped around his cock.

The sound quality is also clear enough to relay the rough hitch of Barton’s breathing as he continues to hit the marks in his arrow patterns. It goes rougher when Romanoff leans up to brush her lips over his neck. “You can fold anytime,” she whispers, and Barton groans between his teeth before taking the next shot.

Greider clicks the feeds shut as fast as possible, her face burning. She’s already watched for way too long. She has basic weapons with Barton on Monday and hand-to-hand with Romanoff on Tuesday and it’s going to be hard enough to look at them without knowing who won the bet.

 

5.

Phil is so exhausted that he doesn’t think he’s moving in a completely straight line. It’s one in the morning and the walk from the intel squadron HQ seems a lot longer than he remembers. The eerie sameness of RAF Mildenhall’s base housing doesn’t help, which is why he goes two houses past their assigned unit and has to turn back.

He’s plodding across the lawn when he glances through the side kitchen window, and pulls up short.

He can see them sleeping on the sofa because the angle goes straight into the lounge. Clint is stretched out on his back with Natasha curled half on top of him. They’re both wearing clean gray Air Force sweats, Clint’s arms wrapped around her and Natasha’s head tucked under his chin.

He’s caught them together before, of course: the Reykjavik safehouse when he arrived early and they were still in the shower, Buenos Aires when Clint accidentally wore his comms transmitter to bed, and in his own damn office four months ago when they thought he was in Portland. This is a lot less graphic than usual, which he appreciates, but it feels more exposed at the same time.

Phil is careful to unlock the front door with slightly more than the normal amount of noise. By the time he walks into the lounge, Natasha is cleaning her guns on the table while Clint stares at rugby highlights on Sky.

“We’re set. 1300 tomorrow to McGuire,” he tells them, and waits until they’re both looking up before he gives them a tiny smile and says deliberately, “Go back to sleep, agents.”

It is hands-down his favorite of all the times he’s caught them, because it’s the first time that Natasha blushes and looks away.


End file.
